iPhone 5: a little bit taller, a little bit baller

And if you've got a girl, you can call her. On LTE.

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"iPhone 5: The biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone," says Apple, setting the bar high for its newest smartphone. Rumors and speculation about the sixth-generation phone began about 4.2 seconds after the introduction of the iPhone 4S last October, but the iPhone 5 has now landed in our grubby little hands. It's thinner. It's lighter. And it's—taller.

Apple brought plenty of improvements to the iPhone this year: the company designed an entirely new processor, there's a new camera, and the phone now supports 4G LTE data speeds. iOS 6 was just rolled out in conjunction with the iPhone 5 release and features its own significant upgrades (read our review of iOS 6 for more details on what's new).

Are these and other changes enough? We hope to help you answer that question with this review. So strap on those fairy wings from your Halloween box in the back of the closet; we're about to get "magical."

Screen size doesn't matter. Or does it?

iPhone 4S on the left, iPhone 5 on the right.

As rumored, the iPhone 5 has a larger screen than all of its predecessors from Apple. Since 2007, Apple has produced iPhones with a 3.5 inch (measured diagonally) screen. But in the sixth generation of the design, Apple has bumped the screen size up to 4 inches diagonally, giving it a 16:9 aspect ratio ideal for widescreen movies and many games.

The iPhone 5's 1136×640 screen features the same "retina" class pixel density as the iPhone 4S—326 pixels per inch. Though images on the iPhone 5 should look just as sharp as those on the iPhone 4 and 4S, Apple claims that the iPhone 5 has 44 percent more color saturation, making photos, icons, videos, games, and other elements appear more vivid.

iPhone 5 on the left, iPhone 4S on the right. The visible difference in color saturation is very slight.

Colors did appear a bit more saturated on the iPhone 5 when directly compared against the iPhone 4S, but the difference was slight. When viewed independently, it's hard to see a noticeable difference.

The slightly taller screen has other benefits, largely in the form of more screen real estate for your home screen and for apps. Apple pointed out at its September media event that the iPhone 5's home screen now fits five rows of icons instead of just four—a minor point, but still much appreciated by those of us who experience icon claustrophobia.

iPhone 5 screenshot on the left, iPhone 4S screenshot on the right. When browsing the Web (or any content), you can now fit more on the screen.

The larger screen also means that you can see slightly more of the Web when using Safari and a bit more text when reading an e-book; you can also watch widescreen movies at full size (well, "full size" for a 4-inch screen) without black bars on the top or bottom. In my testing, this proved surprisingly useful. I hadn't expected the ability to read a few more words or see just a bit more of a list (see above screenshots) to matter much, but I liked it quite a bit.

Developers are now updating their apps to take advantage of the larger screen—many apps already have updates in the App Store. If your favorite apps haven't been updated yet, Apple centers them in the middle of the iPhone 5 screen with a basic black bar on the top and bottom. Instagram is one such app that has yet to be updated; here's how it looks on the iPhone 5 screen right now:

Apps (such as Instagram) that aren't yet updated for the iPhone 5's larger screen get centered with black bars at the top and bottom.

Android fans who like even larger screens may be disappointed by the fact that the iPhone 5 isn't bigger, but let's be honest: Apple was never likely to wander down the path that leads to phone/tablet hybrids with the iPhone. Instead, a smaller version of the iPad may be in the works (an announcement is still expected for October 2012).

That hasn't stopped the Internet from teasing Apple over its decision to release a taller iPhone. Tall phone is tall! But in practice, it works. Other iPhone buyers may like it as I do; at worst, they may feel neutral about it. But it's hard to see many people actively disliking the screen.

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Jacqui Cheng
Jacqui is an Editor at Large at Ars Technica, where she has spent the last eight years writing about Apple culture, gadgets, social networking, privacy, and more. Emailjacqui@arstechnica.com//Twitter@eJacqui

Baller isn't offensive. It is a term that originated in the inner-city and refers to hard pressed individuals to succeed at playing basketball professionally and actually making it to the NBA. It has since become a more general term used to refer to somebody or something that is "on it's way up" or "improving". I think it's perfectly valid.

The word "baller" is offensive. I didn't even read the review, I just checked that it meant what I thought it did and stopped right there.

Even the urban dictionary definition isn't that offensive: "Originally refered ball players that made it out of the streets to make millions as a pro ball player, but now is used to describe any thug that is living large."

Nice review. It was interesting to read that 11mbps typically beats your comcast connection. I, too, have comcast, and it's rare for me to hit less than 35mbps on speed tests.

Of course the big difference between the two is my comcast's data cap is basically unlimited for my usage patterns, whereas any iphone vendor except sprint would have me paying massive overages for anything more than very light browsing with no significant streaming or downloading.

"Extrapolating from this test, one can guess that my total standby time draining from 100 percent to zero would be roughly 120 hours, or five days. While this is less than Apple's estimate of 225 hours, I consider five days to already be quite optimistic."

If any other manufacturer was this off a claim, reviewers would nail them on it. Apple? Oh it's only 100 hours. It's fine. *snuggles iPhone 5* "Who's a flawless phone? Who is? Yes you are. Yes you are." *snuggle, snuggle*

I don't know what the big deal about a new connector is. It's not as though we haven't been through different standards before.Just about every connector we've used over the years has even discontinued, with the loss of use of some peripheral, both major or minor, and that includes bringing PC owners out of the ISA bus world and into the PCI bus world while they were kicking and screaming. Then every three years or so there's another version of that which obsoletes any number of cards.

Parallel ports, RS-232, ADB, various SCSI, VGA, DVI of various types, IBM keyboard connector, game ports, FireWire 400, USB1 and now 2, Ethernet 1,3 and soon 5. I'm sure I missed a few as these were just the first ones I could remember.

So we've seen external HDD's, printers, cameras, keyboards, monitors, networking equipment, and other external devices obsoleted. That's what progress does. No point in making a big deal about it.

The word "baller" is offensive. I didn't even read the review, I just checked that it meant what I thought it did and stopped right there.

Except that it's not being used the way you seem to think it is, O Easily-Offended-One; one of the lovely things about language is that words have multiple, often completely unrelated meanings. In this case, it probably just means it's "cooler."

"Extrapolating from this test, one can guess that my total standby time draining from 100 percent to zero would be roughly 120 hours, or five days. While this is less than Apple's estimate of 225 hours, I consider five days to already be quite optimistic."

If any other manufacturer was this off a claim, reviewers would nail them on it. Apple? Oh it's only 100 hours. It's fine. *snuggles iPhone 5* "Who's a flawless phone? Who is? Yes you are. Yes you are." *snuggle, snuggle*

Except that Apple's estimates always test out to be about as good as the say, or better. This "estimating" doesn't work. A real battery test is needed, and that takes time.

iPhone 4S owners may have a hard time justifying an upgrade just yet.No USB 3.0 even though Apple's newest notebooks support it.

The Ugly:

You'll be reflexively trying to plug 30-pin cables into your iPhone 5's Lightning port for years. Have fun!"

I'm loving the objectivity here. Instead of having Ars resident Mac-fangirl do the review, can't we have someone (Peter Bright?) give some objective insight on the iPhone. Yes, it is better than last years model, but this review is reaching to make all the incremental updates mean more to cover the lameness.

The Bad:

No NFC.No Wireless charging.

The Ugly:

Same uninspired UI (aka grid of icons).

That only took me 5 seconds. I'm sure after a few days I'd find more. Your Bad/Ugly sounds like someone in a job interview. Make your bad things actually sound good. If you don't have anything bad or ugly, then just leave them blank.

Looks like a evolutionary update. Doesn't seem to bring any major or differentiating features to the table.

There really aren't any new technology changes to add to cellular phones right now. Just 'bigger, better, faster' iterations of past features. Specs, if you will.

I liked this review today:

Quote:

"Yes, there are Android phones on the market that equal or surpass the iPhone 5 on paper. Many have larger screens. Some have better battery life and comparable features. But the iPhone 5 wins on fit and finish, and on details that you can’t intuit from a spec sheet."

"there’s an upside to continually refining a great product, year after year: It keeps getting better. It would be silly to say that the iPhone 5 is the perfect smartphone—there’s always room for improvement. But it’s closer to perfection than any smartphone has ever been."